Reasoning with myself about MYSELF (Aged 20)

This was written the week before I decided to drop out of college. I wasn't eating, had trouble crossing streets, cried myself to sleep. It was getting bad.

I had my plan and my desire to do the unspeakable.  I knew that it wasn’t unthinkable because I had had my plan for it for years.  I knew that is wasn’t undoable, because news reports and civic warning groups had been bewailing it, scholars had been studying it, and some friends had experienced it second-hand.  But it was that one thing that was guaranteed to stop conversation.  There’s just not a conversational comeback to “I want to slit my wrists.”
I don’t know what there is to refer to suicide.  I don’t know why it is so alluring, why I want to try it.  I think of it as equal parts similar to my desire to join the military, and my desire to try LSD: an attempt to discover both physically and metaphysically what I am made of.  
I think of it also in the light of the childhood explorer, always wanting to know what lay just beyond the horizon.  But my explorer had always been kept off the streets, inside, leaving the horizons moral rather than geographical, searching my own depths rather than the world’s.  I remember the girl who asked questions of her stuffed animals such as “Why do humans have language?” and “What happens to us when we die?”  I remember the girl who realized by the age of five that not everyone who lived became famous, or even remembered.  I can now see both parts of that little girl in the person I have become: seeking to be remembered for peeking through the veil of life and death, being remembered for exploring the last horizon left within myself.
So maybe it’s a chance to prove myself.  But that reminds me too strongly for comfort of the third episode of Firefly “Bushwhacked”, which depicts the transformation of men into the bestial Reavers.  My own dilemma reminds me of the newly minted Reaver’s growls of “Cut them open, find out what’s inside.”  Sadly enough, this sentiment doesn’t perturb me too much, just the pictures of the physical express of the gashes and holes the Reaver carved into himself to realize this goal.  It is the further growls of “No mercy” and “Cowards.  They were all weak.” that make it distasteful.  But even that tastes a lie.  I am not comfortable with the correlation between suicides and Reavers, between myself and Reavers, but I cannot pull myself away from the similarities.  When I think about it, there is no mercy for myself, for my faults, and every flaw builds toward the reasons for why the world will be better without me.  But then I become angry, at the people who fall short of my expectations, of the standards that I try to hold myself to.  I become angry because I believe that I am so worthless because of the same flaws that they are flaunting, and it doesn’t even faze them.  In a way, my condemnation of my character and my willingness to continue my condemnation of character to destruction of myself, makes me feel that I live on a higher moral plane, a superior moral plane.  When I am in that darkly suicidal place, I do not forgive the faults of others.  I become angry.  I believe them weak.  I never wanted to be a Reaver, to take part in that violent barbarism, and I never found anything attractive or alluring about the Reavers themselves.  I guess that that is a type of condolence, that I have still enough humanity to see the difference between myself and psychotic killers.  But a revelation has been easing over me that perhaps I am just as deeply entwined in violence and intolerance as the Reavers, just a different breed of the diseases.
I don’t feel this way all the time, or even everyday.  It comes, and it goes, and it seems to also follow the pattern of my other biological clocks.  Somedays, I have dreams that seem perfectly viable, that I can work toward and feasibly achieve.  Somedays I can feel beautiful.  Somedays I can see all the potential in all the world brewing at my fingertips, I can see how my actions matter, how and why I could be loved.  
Others I see only my insignificance, my errors, my problems, and they eat me alive.  Other days I am drowning in myself, and I can’t even find the words to say that somethings is wrong.  I don’t know how to ask for help, and I don’t feel like the ways that are prescribed to help have any effect.  So I am left alone with my intolerance, my anger towards people, and my loathing of myself.  Then I feel worse for inflicting my anger on other people, for making them hurt, for insulting them, for even thinking badly of them when they are only acting as it is their personality to act.  As their own minds dictate, without intended malice.  So I lock myself even further away to keep people out of my line of fire.  Because it hurts worse to hurt other people than to hurt myself, on my bad days I hide from other people, making it improbable to hurt them.  Without me, they may feel jilted because in one of my good days they came to depend on me.  But I can live with myself better if the feeling is only jilted, and not actually hurt because I lost my temper.  But this means that there is no one to remind me about the good things in me, no one to help pull me out.  And damn it, but this choice to protect people from myself makes me angrier that they can’t help me, and deepens my resentment over all.  On my bad days, I get sucked into a vicious circle with no easy way out.  Or maybe with no way permanently out.  
Because, as I said, I have good days.  I’ve come up with plans, for building a school, building, curriculum and staff, from bottom to top.  I’ve become interested in a guy.  I’ve become fascinated by a new spirituality based on the greatness of the human ideal, and become smitten with the potential of human action, thought, and beauty.  I have come to believe that there is a fight worth fighting, and that I can be equal to the campaign.  But I have also been able to stop and look around me and see, sense and feel like I haven’t in years.  I have walked down the street and just stared at the beauty of the night, at how the stars are silhouetted against their sky, how rain is reflected on building walls as it drops into the puddles over exterior lights, how the branches of trees make figures, outlines and pictures against the sky, whatever the sky’s color or light, and whatever the trees’ state of leaves or lack there of.  I have seen the beauty of light shining through snow.  It glows blue, funnily enough.  
And the good days don’t just show that nature can be beautiful, but also that I and people in general can be beautiful too.  I can now point definitively to a time when I laughed and knew exactly why I laughed.  I can remember things that are funny, not just because other people found them to be.  I have managed to sit and feel happiness.  Happiness, which is contentment, an equilibrium, in which the pleasantness of the world isn’t encroached upon by the worries of later.  
But then something always pulls me back.
Something dethrones my equilibrium.  Something throws my worries back into the forefront of my mind.  For some reason, I loose my perspective, my purpose.  I forget that I am not in college for the scenery, or for the ambient culture.  I forget and stop carrying about academics in general.  Academics have become so connected to my concept of self that when I stop caring about myself, I stop caring about my grades.  Or, in a worse circumstance, when I stop finding good in myself, I look for it in my academics to make up any deficiency.  The problem with this is not only that by doing so I tie my self worth to the judgments of other people, but that almost always the first scenario is in effect once the second one kicks in, meaning that I want my grades to vindicate me, but I don’t have the energy to put into it.
I had thought that I could handle this, or at least with the medication that I got from the Wellness Center that I could get by.  It felt like such a reprieve when I first started on the medication.  It felt like I could do most anything.  I believed that as I continued on the medication, that my symptoms would feel better and better, until I had no symptoms that were different then anyone else having a bad day.  I felt awake, I didn’t think of killing myself, or hurting myself, or doing anything with any intent to shame other people.  I felt like I smiled more often than I frowned, and I felt that apathy no longer was my dominant emotion.  I talked some with a counselor, but it really was more me listening, and then thinking about the conversations later.  I felt that I was processing the wisdom of an individual who could guide my life out of the mess of emotions and desperations that it had become.  I thought that using the wisdom, the medication, and my own will and dreams, I could move through this depression into a normal life.  But it hasn’t worked out that way.
I stopped talking to the counselor.  This is in violation of the tacit agreement that I made when I got my miracle drugs, and it’s untrue to the promise to myself that I would do everything I could to fix this problem.  If I believed in the power behind the word, I would say that I “should” have gone back, but I have been working to defang “should” for too long to easily go back to it.  But if there is an instance when “should” would be appropriate, it would be in this circumstance.  I should have gone back.  But my arrogance, my hope, and my fear all conspired to keep me out.  I thought that I could handle my depression by myself and the drugs.  I hoped that I would be back to normal soon.  And I was afraid that I would never get back to normal at the same time.